ReadWriteWeb

Last October, Yahoo announced the Yahoo Query Language, a language similar to the popular database language SQL. Then, this February, Yahoo also announced its first major product that made use of YQL, the Open Data Tables, which allowed developers to create their own table definitions besides the ones already provided by Yahoo. As we reported in March, Yahoo then went ahead and extended YQL with YQL Execute, which gives developers even more flexibility and basically turns the web into a giant database that can be processed and mashed up with YQL. Today, Yahoo announced that it has completed its set of YQL verbs with three more functions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) that now also allow developers to not just read and manipulate data, but also write data back to other services.

Perhaps the biggest problem with natural language search is that it's incredibly difficult to try and automate machine-assigned ontologies. Essentially, machines just don't get it.

This is precisely the reason why Canadian technologist Bruce Johnson switched his focus from semantic tagging to a new style of search. Says Johnson, "Machines don't really deconstruct language well. They miss so many of the ambiguities and they often don't pick up on synonyms." As a result, Johnson's Semanti was built in the belief that humans are best at determining search relevancy. ReadWriteWeb spoke to Johnson, about how his start up, differs from some of the semantic web's more-recognized players like Hakia and Powerset.

Most semantic search services are natural language search engines; however, Semanti employs a system of personal bookmarks, a drop-down menu with multiple definitions, and search recommendations pulled from Facebook friends. Semanti actually increases relevancy by introducing human eyes and opinions into the search process.

A few days ago, Yahoo! released a new version of their browser toolbar and this time, they've made it available for Firefox users, too, albeit in a beta format. Previously, the new Yahoo! Toolbar was an IE-only download which delivered an integrated search box and links to Yahoo-owned sites and applications. Now the toolbar introduces some new features like "Site Previews" and faster search courtesy of Inquisitor. There's only one problem with the software (besides the fact that toolbars in and of themselves are incredibly passé): it doesn't work on Windows 7.

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.

Yoelle Maarek, the woman credited with the creation of Google Suggest and a variety of other innovative features, has left the company and will now lead Yahoo's research efforts in the tech hot-bed of Israel. It's an interesting move, to go from the clear market leader to a company widely criticized for its flaccid search and monetization.

When it comes to innovation, though, Yahoo is no slouch - and a new day may be dawning there with the arrival of new CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz seems to have a good sense of humor and as the creator of the often-wacky Google Suggest product, we assume Maarek does too. Where would you rather work, at Google or at Yahoo, if you had the choice?

Yahoo Image Search got a nice update today that allows users to filter search results by Creative Commons (CC) license.

For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.

At the end of last week, Yahoo! introduced an update to their iPhone application (iTunes URL) which now includes the ability to perform web searches using only your voice. This is the first real competitor to Google's Mobile App, whose voice recognition technology came to the iPhone back in November of 2008. Now the only question is how do these two apps compare?

A few weeks ago, we heard that Yahoo was readying a Portuguese-only Twitter clone under the name Yahoo Meme. Today, we finally got our invitation to try this new service, and while it is indeed an interesting micro-blogging service, we wouldn't go as far as calling it a "Twitter killer." Instead of cloning Twitter's communications features like @ replies and direct messages, Meme goes back to the basics of micro-blogging. Users can upload photos and post text (without a 140 character limit), YouTube videos (just copy and paste the URL), and links to MP3 files.

"I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud"

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

Yahoo introduced a new version of its Yahoo Music artist homepages today, which now include links to YouTube videos, Pandora radio stations, Last.fm, and photos from Flickr. Yahoo also plans to open up its API so that others can build applications for Yahoo Music, and, at a later point, artists will be able to create their own customized pages on Yahoo Music as well. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, users can easily customize the new artist homepages to their own liking.